Ding Dong the Witch is Dead

Ladies and gentlemen, if you are a web developer, you may have noticed a few differences over the past few months. The sky is bluer, food tastes a little better, and you have a new, youthful spring to your step. Why? Internet Explorer 6 is finally dead. With Microsoft officially ending support for the oft-criticized browser, and sites all over the world simply redirecting you to a “get a real browser” message, it looks like we can all finally move on. Good riddance.

Why it was so bad

IE6 did things a little different. For no good reason. It rendered your stylesheets a little differently, it adhered to web standards a little differently, and let’s face it, it was a security nightmare. Released August 27, 2001, Internet Explorer 6 was a lame duck from the get-go. It was riddled with security issues and refused to conform to modern web standards. As a web developer, you could always get it to do what you wanted, but it was always a painstaking process. It went something like this: Check site in IE6, check in Firefox, back to IE6, oops, now we are broken in Firefox. Start over. It was tedious and inefficient, yet inexplicably used by enough users to make it a required platform for any site build. The only mystery here is how such a horrendous browser was supported and used by users for ten years. As a web developer, I still run into clients who use IE6, which makes it difficult to say, “Trust me, the site looks great… Just not on any machine in your building.”

Moving forward

Why dwell. I will certainly not miss using JavaScript to allow PNG support or wrestling with the browser over a few pixels, but at least with the world leaving IE6 in the rearview mirror, developers now have options. What I do, is if IE6 is an absolute requirement for a project, I charge as such. There is no way around it, if you want your site to look good in IE6 and also every browser the rest of the world is using, it’s going to require development time. So let’s all throw our hands in the air and give a final shout-out to everyones least favorite browser, and to the world, for finally kicking it to the curb.

If you still use IE6, here’s a couple good places to fix your twisted Internet browsing: